New developments in artificial intelligence (AI) based solutions can help all energy companies put defenders ahead of attackers, while adapting to the …

AI isn't a far-off technology that will involve self-thinking "robot overlords." The reach of AI will affect many areas of technology, but its presence will be acutely felt within both cybersecurity threats and the strength of systems to protect against threats. The technology might have been able to predict and slow the spread of the infamous WannaCry malware, and proponents hope it can serve such a purpose in the future. AI brings new opportunities to businesses and people, but the insights and power derived from AI are not always going to be used by "good actors". The various processes that spot attacks and perform functions against those attacks can be improved with AI that is predictive and covers a lot of scenarios.

In the remote work environment spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic, more flexible, quicker methods of getting systems the authority to securely operate is more critical than ever, said a top IT advisor at the Department of Health and Human Services. "Machine learning is critical in terms of fighting fire with fire. You're going to lose that battle" with hackers, said Oki Mek, senior advisor to the agency's CIO and its ReImagine project. HHS is one of the agencies at the center of the federal government's response to the COVID pandemic. The agency is "getting hit hard" by hackers attempting to penetrate its networks, said Mek.

One year ago, Maneesh Agrawala of Stanford helped develop a lip-sync technology that allowed video editors to almost undetectably modify speakers' words. The tool could seamlessly insert words that a person never said, even mid-sentence, or eliminate words she had said. To the naked eye, and even to many computer-based systems, nothing would look amiss. The tool made it much easier to fix glitches without re-shooting entire scenes, as well as to tailor TV shows or movies for different audiences in different places. But the technology also created worrisome new opportunities for hard-to-spot deep-fake videos that are created for the express purpose of distorting the truth.

One of the challenging problems in sequence generation tasks is the optimized generation of sequences with specific desired goals. Current sequential generative models mainly generate sequences to closely mimic the training data, without direct optimization of desired goals or properties specific to the task. We introduce OptiGAN, a generative model that incorporates both Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize desired goal scores using policy gradients. We apply our model to text and real-valued sequence generation, where our model is able to achieve higher desired scores out-performing GAN and RL baselines, while not sacrificing output sample diversity.

Emergency response to incidents such as accidents, crimes, and fires is a major problem faced by communities. Emergency response management comprises of several stages and sub-problems like forecasting, resource allocation, and dispatch. The design of principled approaches to tackle each problem is necessary to create efficient emergency response management (ERM) pipelines. Over the last six years, we have worked with several first responder organizations to design ERM pipelines. In this paper, we highlight some of the challenges that we have identified and lessons that we have learned through our experience in this domain. Such challenges are particularly relevant for practitioners and researchers, and are important considerations even in the design of response strategies to mitigate disasters like floods and earthquakes.

RxR is multilingual (English, Hindi, and Telugu) and larger (more paths and instructions) than other VLN datasets. It emphasizes the role of language in VLN by addressing known biases in paths and eliciting more references to visible entities. Furthermore, each word in an instruction is time-aligned to the virtual poses of instruction creators and validators. We establish baseline scores for monolingual and multilingual settings and multitask learning when including Room-to-Room annotations (Anderson et al., 2018b). We also provide results for a model that learns from synchronized pose traces by focusing only on portions of the panorama attended to in human Figure 1: RxR's instructions are densely grounded to demonstrations. The size, scope and detail of the visual scene by aligning the annotator's virtual pose RxR dramatically expands the frontier for research to their spoken instructions for navigating a path.

Inferring graph structure from observations on the nodes is an important and popular network science task. Departing from the more common inference of a single graph and motivated by social and biological networks, we study the problem of jointly inferring multiple graphs from the observation of signals at their nodes (graph signals), which are assumed to be stationary in the sought graphs. From a mathematical point of view, graph stationarity implies that the mapping between the covariance of the signals and the sparse matrix representing the underlying graph is given by a matrix polynomial. A prominent example is that of Markov random fields, where the inverse of the covariance yields the sparse matrix of interest. From a modeling perspective, stationary graph signals can be used to model linear network processes evolving on a set of (not necessarily known) networks. Leveraging that matrix polynomials commute, a convex optimization method along with sufficient conditions that guarantee the recovery of the true graphs are provided when perfect covariance information is available. Particularly important from an empirical viewpoint, we provide high-probability bounds on the recovery error as a function of the number of signals observed and other key problem parameters. Numerical experiments using synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with perfect covariance information as well as its robustness in the noisy regime.

Recently, Neural Topic Models (NTMs) inspired by variational autoencoders have obtained increasingly research interest due to their promising results on text analysis. However, it is usually hard for existing NTMs to achieve good document representation and coherent/diverse topics at the same time. Moreover, they often degrade their performance severely on short documents. The requirement of reparameterisation could also comprise their training quality and model flexibility. To address these shortcomings, we present a new neural topic model via the theory of optimal transport (OT). Specifically, we propose to learn the topic distribution of a document by directly minimising its OT distance to the document's word distributions. Importantly, the cost matrix of the OT distance models the weights between topics and words, which is constructed by the distances between topics and words in an embedding space. Our proposed model can be trained efficiently with a differentiable loss. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art NTMs on discovering more coherent and diverse topics and deriving better document representations for both regular and short texts.

Today, human operators primarily perform voltage control of the electric transmission system. As the complexity of the grid increases, so does its operation, suggesting additional automation could be beneficial. A subset of machine learning known as deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently shown promise in performing tasks typically performed by humans. This paper applies DRL to the transmission voltage control problem, presents open-source DRL environments for voltage control, proposes a novel modification to the "deep Q network" (DQN) algorithm, and performs experiments at scale with systems up to 500 buses. The promise of applying DRL to voltage control is demonstrated, though more research is needed to enable DRL-based techniques to consistently outperform conventional methods.